Resources

Online resources

Chasing the Butterfly - Recreating Grieg’s 1903 recordings and beyond…
In 2008 Sigurd Slåttebrekk and Tony Harrison recreated the only recordings made by Edvard Grieg in Paris in 1903. The recreations were made on Grieg’s own Piano at his home, Troldhaugen in Bergen Norway.
http://www.chasingthebutterfly.no

Hochschule der Künste Bern - Verkörperte Traditionen romantischer Musikpraxis
Embodiment project by Kai Köpp, Johannes Gebauer, Sebastian Bausch and Camilla Köhnken Shapiro, focusing on Romantic performance practice.
https://www.hkb-interpretation.ch/projekte/verkoerperte-traditionen-romantischer-musikpraxis/article-245

The Brahms Lab - Adventures in 19th-century performance practice
On this facebook page, Kate Bennett Wadsworth posts inspiring quotes and observations found during her research on the performance practice in Brahms’ musical circle.
https://m.facebook.com/brahmslab/

Performing Romantic Music - A Blog by Mark Bailey
Mark Bailey is the head of the Yale Collection of Historical Sound Recordings and focuses much of his his work, guidance, and teaching on romantic-era performance practice.
https://performingromanticmusic.blogspot.com

(Re)constructing early recordings - A guide for historically-informed performance
This project led by Inja Stanovic concerns the production of early recordings; through a (re)construction of mechanical recording methods, musical performances are captured, analysed, and made available to the international community of musical researchers. All recordings are simultaneously recorded using contemporary digital technologies, allowing for direct comparisons between the acoustic and digital recordings. Results, which integrate creative practice and theoretical research, illuminate both performance and recording practices of the past, and elaborate a method for future research into early recordings.
https://injastanovic.com/reconstructing-early-recordings/

CHASE - Collection of Historical Annotated String Editions
The aim of this project was to create a database of 19th-century performing editions of string chamber music, together with analysis and contextualization of the material. Such editions were mostly edited by the leading instrumentalists of the time, and in many cases were influential well into the twentieth century. They contain, therefore, important evidence of how ideas about the transmission of performance occurred over a substantial historical period. They also provide considerable empirical evidence with which to approach questions of pedagogical practice, or the wider and equally vexed question of ‘schools’ of playing.
http://mhm.hud.ac.uk/chase/

The American Romantics - An orchestral collective
Ensemble founded in 2017 by Kevin Sherwin and Mark Bailey, inspired by the extraordinary and forgotten artistry of musicians from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Working closely with the Yale Collection of Historical Sound Recordings, their performers uncover the stylistic performance practices of the Romantic-era.
https://americanromantics.org/about-us

Joseph Joachim - Biography and Research
This website (by Robert W. Eshbach) is dedicated to the life and art of Joseph Joachim. The information on the site derives from his ongoing research and writing.
https://josephjoachim.com

TCHIP - Transforming C19 HIP
TCHIP is a 5-year research project hosted by the University of Oxford Faculty of Music. They employ research methods associated with social and cultural musicology, and aim to contribute to knowledge of under-researched groups (e.g. orchestral and theatre musicians). Their focus is not on the public act of performance, but on everything that leads up that point. They believe that changing performance depends upon changing ‘pre-performance’ – the rich and complex set of practices that precede performance.
https://c19hip.web.ox.ac.uk/home

Challenging Performance - Classical Music Performance Norms and How to Escape Them
Over the past six decades, the way that classical scores are performed has grown increasingly homogenised. We make the case for allowing performances to be much less uniform and performers much more creative. This eBook (also available as a PDF), website, and set of podcasts by Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, this project does not only concern HIP approaches to Romantic music, but his knowledge of the earliest sound recordings available has led him to fundamentally question the ways in which we interact with the written score today.

Dissertations

Scott, Anna, Romanticizing Brahms : Early Recordings and the Reconstruction of Brahmsian Identity
“Despite most pianists' claims of historical deference and creative agency, their performances of Brahms's piano works are nothing like the early-recorded performances of the composer and his students: gaps that are mediated by understandings of Brahms's Classical canonic identity, the performance norms that protect that identity, and those norms' underlying aesthetic ideology of control. […] This volume seeks to problematize understandings of Brahms's identity: by investigating the origins and vestiges of the aesthetic ideology of control; by analysing and copying the recordings of pianists in the composer's inner circle; and by applying these pianists' styles in ways that are just as disruptive to modern notions of Brahmsian identity as their early-recorded models. […]”
https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/handle/1887/29987

Stam, Emlyn, Doctoral Thesis: In Search of a Lost Language: Performing in Early-Recorded Style in Viola and String Quartet Repertoires
“Early recordings made between the 1880s and mid-1930s reveal a wide gap between the performance practices of a century ago and those of today. Though many contemporary musicians often claim fidelity to composers’ intentions, they clearly prefer to avoid the risks associated with playing in ways familiar to the very composers to whom they pledge fidelity. Given this state of affairs, I suggest a re-thinking of the concept of Werktreue, predicated upon the notion that 19th-century performers enacted their fidelity to works and composers by creating altered and highly personalized versions of the detail, structure and time of composers’ works. My own performances aim to enact this performer-centred Werktreue in order to circumvent the frequently restrictive nature of modern performance practices while closing the gap between these practices and those heard on early recordings of viola solo, viola/piano and string quartet repertoires. The question my work engages with is: how might viola and string quartet playing in the performer-centered, moment-to-moment and communicative style heard on early recordings be brought about today? […]”
https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/handle/1887/79999

Bennett Wadsworth, Kate, Doctoral Thesis: ‘Precisely marked in the tradition of the composer’: the performing editions of Friedrich Grützmacher
“The mid-19th century saw the rise and fall of performing editions, musical scores which a respected performer has marked up with all of the advice considered necessary for a tasteful performance of the piece. […] While performing editions can tell us an enormous amount about 19th-century performing practices, as well as about the notational choices of 19th-century composers, we cannot learn from them without first confronting the difference in taste, not only between our playing styles and the editors’, but also between the ideals that drove their editorial work and the modern ideal of a good edition. This is a practice-led study of the much-maligned performing editions of the cellist, Friedrich Grützmacher (1832-1903). Now derided as a musical vandal, Grützmacher was seen in his day as a serious and noble artist, respected as a performer and highly sought-after as a teacher. The first section of this thesis establishes him as a reliable model of good taste within a 19th-century German tradition of music making, referred to at the time as 'classical', that surrounds the compositions of Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Brahms. The second part of the thesis explores the performing practice implications of his richly annotated editions and transcriptions for the cello, with research questions centred around the theme of 'decoding' Grützmacher's style: I wished to find the expressive grammar that directed his fingering choices (especially connected to portamento), his bowings and bow distribution, and his sense of timing. […] In the third section of the thesis, I apply my new sense of Grützmacher's expressive grammar to a piece which he never edited, but was premiered by two of his students: the Brahms Cello Sonata Op. 38. In this final project, I aim to reconcile my new instincts as a Grützmacher student with the professional pressures on modern historical performers, and I argue that such a reconciliation is possible and worth pursuing.”
http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/19561/

ter Haar, Job, Doctoral Thesis: The Playing Style of Alfredo Piatti – Learning from a Nineteenth-Century Virtuoso
“Alfredo Piatti (1822-1901) is widely seen as one of the most important cellists of the nineteenth century. For over fifty years he was the leading cellist in Britain. He excelled in various genres, most notably in chamber music. A long-time teacher at the Royal Academy of Music, he had a profound influence on the English and American schools of cello playing. […] Although his life and career are well documented, little detailed information about his playing has been published. This thesis presents and analyses the sources of Piatti’s playing style that were collected in the course of this project, and describes how the writer used these sources to inform his own playing. […] The outcomes of this project include a knowledge base that summarises the research findings, and a recording of the Sonata for Piano and Cello op. 65 by Frederic Chopin that reflects the artistic process of the writer, who internalised the knowledge base to create an ‘Inner Piatti’. […]”
http://www.jobterhaarpiattithesis.nl/?fbclid=IwAR2-mr36y_kQdJCOxpBO0kS4DCWX_ZdXl6eSXcYZd0aOSegKdeU2cKdIJyc
Download link:
https://jobterhaarpiattithesis.files.wordpress.com/2019/06/the-playing-style-of-alfredo-piatti.pdf

Leech-Wilkinson, Daniel, The Changing Sound of Music: Approaches to Studying Recorded Musical Performance (London: CHARM, 2009)
“What I’m aiming to do in this book […] is to take a step towards a musicology that studies how music works in us through performance.
How might we do this? We’ll need a way of studying sounds, and what performers do to make them, and we’ll need to start, at least, to think about how we perceive them. […] And that means looking rather closely at recordings.
What will this book do for you? If you’re a performer, I very much hope that the variety of performance styles we’ll examine may open your ears to a range of possibilities far wider than is currently practised […]. I hope it may be difficult to come away from this book without a sense that, if not anything goes, at any rate a lot more can go today than one might think.”
https://charm.rhul.ac.uk/studies/chapters/intro.html

Books

Milsom, David, Theory and Practice in Late Nineteenth-Century Violin Performance 1850–1900 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003)
With most of Western art music, it can be argued that music-making requires performers to interpret a composer's original, notated ideas. Often, an informed and perceptive reading of the score needs to be combined with the inspiration to convey the feelings and emotions intended by the composer. The difficulties inherent in such an undertaking are further heightened when the music was composed several generations ago. In this book, David Milsom argues that in order to convey late 19th-century musical style appropriately, the performer needs to have a grasp of the philosophical orientation of musical thinking at that time. In effect, one must "unlearn" the value systems of the present, in order to assimilate those of the late 19th century. To arrive at a better understanding of performance in this period, the book examines performing style in the German and Franco-Belgian schools of violin playing from c.1850 - c.1900. Milsom explores selected instrumental treatises written by noted players and theorists, together with a number of recorded performances given by celebrated artists in the early years of the 20th century, to review the similarities and differences between theory and practice. An accompanying CD illustrates this relationship.

Philip, Robert, Early Recordings and Musical Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)
Until recently, early recordings were regarded as little more than old-fashioned curiosities by musicians. Scholars and musicians now are beginning to realise their importance as historical documents which preserve the performance of composers and the musicians with whom they worked. In this fascinating study, Robert Philip argues that recordings of the early twentieth-century provide an important and hitherto neglected resource in the history of musical performance. The book concentrates on aspects of performance which underwent the greatest change in the early twentieth century, including rhythm, rubato, vibrato, and portamento. The final chapters explore some of the implications of these changes, both for the study of earlier periods and for the understanding of our own attitudes to the music of the past.

Philip, Robert, Performing Music in the Age of Recording (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2004)

Peres da Costa, Neal, Off the Record: Performing Practices in Romantic Piano Playing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)
From the start, this book brings light to many questions and uncertainties about nineteenth-century piano performance practice, addressing, in addition to dynamics, pedaling, tone and touch, issues such as dislocation, unnotated arpeggiation, rubato and tempo modification. The book features in-depth analysis of early- to mid-twentieth-century piano performances, using piano rolls and recordings of renowned pianists and pedagogues as guidance.

Kennaway, George, Playing the Cello, 1780–1930, (Farnham, 2014)
This innovative study of nineteenth-century cellists and cello playing shows how simple concepts of posture, technique and expression changed over time, while acknowledging that many different practices co-existed. By placing an awareness of this diversity at the centre of an historical narrative, George Kennaway has produced a unique cultural history of performance practices. In addition to drawing upon an unusually wide range of source materials - from instructional methods to poetry, novels and film - Kennaway acknowledges the instability and ambiguity of the data that supports historically informed performance. By examining nineteenth-century assumptions about the very nature of the cello itself, he demonstrates new ways of thinking about historical performance today. Kennaway’s treatment of tone quality and projection, and of posture, bow-strokes and fingering, is informed by his practical insights as a professional cellist and teacher. Vibrato and portamento are examined in the context of an increasing divergence between theory and practice, as seen in printed sources and heard in early cello recordings. […]

Bruce Ranken, Marion, Some points of violin playing and musical performance as learnt at the Hochschule für Musik when I was a student there, 1902-1909,  (Edinburgh: Privately Printed, 1939)
Violinist Marion (Maria) Bruce Ranken (1884 in Arbroath, Scotland — 1966) was the daughter of Hon. Frederick John Bruce and Katherine Fernie. In her book, she claims that her “Hochschule instruction” included “six years of lessons with Karl Klingler who was for ten years, first as pupil and later as colleague, in close contact with Joachim himself — numerous chamber-music lessons with Arthur Williams, senior and most outstanding pupil of Hausmann, during the same period of six years, and finally, some years of orchestral playing and one summer of quartet lessons under Hausmann, cellist of the Joachim quartet. Also during four years I was constantly a listener at the Joachim quartet concerts and at the ‘General Proben’ (dress rehearsals) in the School Hall which always preceded these concerts.” [Ranken, p. 7] Marion Ranken had three brothers who likewise studied violin at the Hochschule: Charles (1883 — 1958), James (1887 — 1917), and Lewis (1880 — 1961).
(Above description from https://josephjoachim.com/2013/08/04/marion-bruce-ranken-on-joachim-and-wagner/)